The International Atomic Energy Agency on Sunday hit back at Israeli claims that it demonstrates “weakness” in its oversight of the 2015 nuclear deal between Iran and world powers.
The comments came after the Haaretz newspaper cited several anonymous Israeli officials as saying that the IAEA failed to inspect suspicious sites in Iran even after they were provided with intelligence about them by an unidentified western “entity”, i24news reported.
“This article does not accurately reflect the safeguards work of the IAEA,” a spokesman for the UN nuclear agency said in a statement emailed to i24news.
“As Director General Yukiya Amano has said, the IAEA has conducted many complementary accesses [CAs] in Iran since Implementation Day of the JCPOA [nuclear deal], and will continue to request access to sites and locations before drawing a broader conclusion for the country,” the spokesman said.
The spokesman also said that under the agreement with Iran, the agency “has broader access to information and locations” which “significantly increases the ability to verify the peaceful use of all nuclear material in a country. In Iran, as of today we have been able to visit, as planned, all sites and locations that we have identified for CAs.”